I am an English professor at a two-year college where I teach writing (creative and expository) and literature. My poetry has appeared in a number of small magazines, and I have two poetry chapbooks, That’s the Way the Music Sounds, from Finishing Line Press (2009) and Talking to the Mirror from The Last Automat Press (2010). In addition to loving poetry, I am also a fledgling mystery novelist in search of an agent. I live with another English professor and poet, Dr. Van Hartmann, and would rather be rich than famous.

Portrait I

So Marta, the woman who shared a hallway with meat the school where I met my husband before his wife died;she who down the hall one day was weepingbecause she & her lover had brokenagain, he to return to his wife,and she to the quiet apartment she sharedwith their thirty-year affair.I wasn’t to tell; I was never to tell, a skill I was already versed inhaving grown up in a house where mother slept allafternoon, lonely shadows stretching across her still face,dream journals open on the rumpled sheets.

There was a child once, a flightto Puerto Rico before such things were legal,a dead brother, parents for whom she cared as they lingered,stalling her PhD, still unfinished, entangled again and again with him.And now, near seventy, she teaches writing part-time, as always,and reads intelligent books over vegetable dinners with wineoff the grid upstate in a farmhouse, hair long and silver,her small, precise fingers flickering over a page of text.At least this is how I imagine her, since we lost touch years ago:quiet, reading, captured by Wyeth or Hopper, perhapslooking out the windowat an empty field.

Portrait II

My Aunt Carolyn, the last time I saw her, warned me not to standtoo close to the microwave because the ELFs caused cancer,this as she heated a bag to clutch after the chemotherapy for her lungsshrunk her to a stick. Later, she held my hand and told me she wanted mewith her at the pearly gates where she said all the aunties were waiting.Two years now she’s been gone.Oh, Auntie, I hope your pearly gates glisten with jewels and that youhave found forgiveness for all your unnamed sins—and mine.That your glorious soprano is singing in God’s choir, and,if that’s where we all end up, I’ll be there with you,at least painted in the background, like the girl with her hair in a braidin Henry Lerolle’s The Organ Rehearsal, watching you at the balcony’s edgein your funny hat, a little worse for the wear, singing to the sheer white light.